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You may be right in that it may not fully stop spammers, but I would argue it would definitely reduce how many there are. There's different types of twitter scams, but the most annoying and most prominent one is when a bad actor spams either replies of tweets of prominent people/tags pre selected accounts in their own tweets. This type of spam requires thousands of accounts per round because twitter actually locks such accounts pretty quickly if you abuse it, so they usually make a dozen tweets per account and then move to the next account. So if someone were to pay $8 per account for such campaign, that would be $8000 per 1000 accounts. Even though it could be profitable to pay this much, that's a much more expensive start up cost for these spammers. Currently, one new twitter account can be bought for around $0.25 and software to spam costs anywhere from a few hundred for shitty ones and thousand for good ones. So that raises startup costs from a few hundred bucks to thousands. And if scammers were to actually pay this much, this is a win for twitter because they would be getting a lot of money from these spammers.
Why can normal accounts suddenly not spam people? That'd require better spam prevention for non-verified accounts, which you can implement without this change. Doesn't seem related.
Elon said that paid accounts will get priority in replies. So, these spam messages will still be there, just at the bottom of the thread, which lowers engagement. Currently, if you check replies under tweets of some prominent figures, in the first few mins after the tweet all replies are bots
... right ... because they are bots, and can post a reply 2 seconds after the tweet is posted. Nobody else has replied in the first few minutes. And then the bot replies get overtaken by interesting replies that get likes. How would boosting verified accounts change this? The verified accounts still won't reply immediately because they aren't bots.
A lot of spam is just bots using the search api (probably) for crypto terms and replying to people with scams. This won't help with that either.
Also, significantly boosting verified accounts over nonverified accounts to stop the kind of spam that gets lots of likes on highly replied tweets (non-highly replied tweets don't have enough replies for it to matter) would degrade the user experience, right, because instead of seeing the best tweets you just see tweets from people who pay money?
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The thing about fraud/scams is that the supply curve slopes downwards. When you put in hoops to jump through you raise the cost of doing fraud as well as the cost of being a real person just trying to do their thing. The name of the game is to raise the cost for scammers by a lot, but for real people by only a little.
Right now, the cost of doing fraud/scams is mostly being good at selenium scripting through a botnet (cheap). An $8 charge passing through the ordinary financial system is a lot harder to do. Certainly far from impossible, but the set of people who can both do selenium scripting through a botnet and pass fake charges through the financial system is much smaller - the net result is we get less of it.
Here's a short list of people who I can say with 100% certainty know and have deeply internalized this fact: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, all of whom got very rich by doing a good job putting this principle into practice.
You didn't answer the question. How does making blue checkmarks cost money raise the cost of scams? You can still run scams with nonverified accounts exactly like you do now. Some people, but a small fraction, run scams with stolen verified accounts - those people will just switch to fresh paid verified accounts. But most scams weren't run with verified accounts before this change, and still won't be run with verified accounts after this change. If there's some separate change that makes scamming-without-checkmark much harder, that's fine, but you can do that without $8/mo verification, and $8/mo verification doesn't make that any easier or harder
I believe the theory is that once bluechecks are common, anyone without them will be more suspicious. Musk also mentions that bluechecks get priority in ranking, meaning unverified EloonMuskCryptoGiveaway is buried way down in the replies.
That really does not make sense. I use twitter a lot, and most of the people I follow do not have checkmarks, and none of them are going to buy it because they are just people who use twitter for fun or on breaks from work or w/e. Random repliers in comments sections still aren't gonna buy the checkmark. And there are already parts of twitter where most people are verified and have a lot of followers ... and they still get piled with scams replying to their comments.
Can you draw out a specific scenario here - what part of twitter, in reply to what accounts, where the scammers are currently using unverified accounts successfully but won't be able to anymore because most users will have bluechecks, as they are more common, so the scammers will stand out? I can't think of a single section of twitter where that will happen. Either all the big people already have checkmarks and their followers do not (and that will either not change or nobody will have checkmarks because people won't pay 100/year for it), or none of the posters or repliers have checkmarks, and that will not change.
Like, "8/mo bluecheck prevents spam" doesn't make sense, at all. Do people just believe it because musk says it will? Do they assume he figured it out?
I didn't say I think it will necessarily work, I was just laying out my best guess as to theory. The specific theory:
General use case:
Verification is easy to get, so people get used to seeing bluechecks next to @joespizzastamfordct, @marietoplessnerd, etc.
!!@! Elon Musk Cr1pt0 Giveaway !!@! doesn't have a bluecheck.
People more likely to spot the scam due to lack of a bluecheck.
This is a plausible use case and hardly unprecedented. Companies with real money on the line (read: financial institutions who take losses for scams their customers fall for) put significant effort into educating customers to distinguish between real calls and scams.
In the replies use case:
Elon Musk tweets "journalists often lie".
5,000 people reply including Jason Calcanis, Kanye West, Taylor Lorenz, Aella and the real Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee are at the top since they are verified.
Regular guy decides to read the replies and actively scrolldown to even see the crypto scammer.
I have no idea if this will work, but there are clear mechanisms by which it can work.
Of course, I also think it's plausible that Musk is doing it merely to inflate away the value of journalist's favorite status symbol. Now Taylor Lorenz is no more special than Mike's Computer Repair of Talahassee.
Yeah, but the median twitter user, even the median twitter user with 50k followers, aren't gonna spend $8/month for the checkmark (although if they did, twitter would get a new massive revenue stream), so it won't have that effect
Regular people don't have to spend $8/month for either of my mechanisms work.
The closest thing to "regular people" who get a bluecheck in my example is @joespizzastamfordct. Those sorts of people absolutely do pay for similar things on other social media: WhatsApp business accounts, linkedin pro, google map's "not the closest or best but they paid us so they get to the top" search results, yelp for business.
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this would be true if it was $8 to create any twitter account. Even a tiny nominal fee of $.1 to register a twitter account would probably reduce the spam overall considerably. But $8 to give an ordinary account into one that has special privileges is a good deal.
This is why I unironically think block chain verified accounts that have a negligible one time minting fee to prevent spammers is eventually going to be a big deal.
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That makes no sense. If it's not a good deal to get a basic account at $1, let alone $8, then how is it a good deal to spend $8 just to get some minor privileges?
they are not minor though. were talking verification-level privileges. ppl pay $1k or more for this. I think though it will not have all the privileges. But just having your comments rank high and not be put in the spam filter is a major benefit. Worth more than $8 if you have a small business and just need the extra visibility (way cheaper than advertising, which can easily cost $1 per click).
You said (I haven't read myself because Twitter delenda est) that the benefits are:
Priority in replies
Priority in mentions
Priority in search
Those are pretty minor benefits. I sincerely doubt that a scammer will get more than 8x as much value from those as from a normal account (which is what it would mean for them to be willing to pay $8 for verification but unwilling to pay $1 for a normal account). There is also no mention of being immune to spam filters in what you listed there, so unless you forgot to mention it in your OP I'm not sure where that is coming from.
And perhaps people did pay $1000 or more for verified accounts before. Honestly I would never have believed people were that retarded, but I'll take your word for it. But you seem to be assuming that it's because being verified had some great practical benefit. That doesn't seem right to me. Having a verified account (until now at least) was a status symbol. People will pay absurd amount of money for all kinds of status symbols, that doesn't therefore mean they derive material benefit from them. It means people are vain and will do stupid shit to seek status.
It's not uncommon for crypto scammers impersonating Musk or some other famous person to make thousands of dollars with a crypto scam using a verified account, hence why they pay $1k for it. A tweet by Musk not uncommonly gets 40k+ comment replies, only 200 at a time can shown, and replies by verified accounts have priority over the non-verified ones and are not buried. For someone promoting a scam that can net thousands of dollars easily, this is worth it.
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